PROTECT THE PAINT

Lakers fans celebrate moronically

After the Lakers won it all on Sunday evening, pictures from downtown Los Angeles started surfacing  onto the internet, depicting damage caused by riotous  “celebrating fans”.

It is disheartening to the true sports fans out there to see acts of social deviance. As a fan of your team you should be entitled to celebrate hard-fought victories, but you should never destroy your fellow mans hard work. It is no excuse for deconstructing buildings, and tearing down traffic signals. Nor should someone instill fear into someone’s heart by looting them while they are trying to make an honest wage behind the counter of a gas station.

All the blood, sweat and tears that go into a basketball season are of nowhere near the importance compared to those done by our non-ahtlete stars making far less income, yet having a far more relevant impact on our daily lives.

What should we do to put these acts to rest? Do we punish the true fans, whom eagerly anticipate taking a day off from work to go downtown for a victory parade by canceling such events? Maybe we should.

Does the Coffee Bean support the Orlando Magic?? (LAist.com)

How do we sift out the bad seeds? The odds are most of the people looting, destroying, and making a mess of things are probably not donning their Lakers gear while doing so.

They are most likely just looking for an excuse to do something brainless and stupid, after consuming a lot of alcoholic beverages.

The sad thing to me is that the local Los Angeles media coverage of the finals infuses sensationalized stories about how the police are gearing up to control and contain rioters during the post NBA Finals victory celebration.

What we fail to often ask is: Is it possible these people  might not feel compelled to act this way if the local news was not hyping it up so much? Would they go about their own business, and decide to have another cold one, then just sleep it off? Perhaps stay where they are, crank up the music, and party amongst their friends? There is the experssion “monkey see, monkey do” after all.

Either way, there is no purpose to celebrate  this NBA Finals victory by the Lakers this violently. The Lakers have already won significant amounts of titles this decade, having a Three-Peat championship run ending only 6 years ago.

I could understand if you were a franchise whom has never tasted an NBA championship I would not condone it, but I could at least understand it. But Lakers fans?

Maybe the NBA should have a rule banning franchises from being allowed celebratory parades for Championships if the people of that area commit stupid deeds of senseless violence.

A Player is suspended for their bad behavior: Why should a city escape such punishment. This might sound a bit radical but when a harsh punishment is put in place, people tend to reform their actions accordingly.

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